How She Goes
Who she is:
Everything.
Hearty laughs and careless afternoons,
lazy drives to the sea. Ice cream
on cold mornings. Wind, the thief
of breath. That wretched bandit,
time. Too fast, too fast, days
soaked in city fog and hourglass sand,
what is the difference between yesterday
and tomorrow? The city as summer falls—
the city at its kindest. After the light,
before the dark—parlors and kittens,
flickering lights, amber. The sun sets,
the bread rises.
And she is…
Melancholy.
Damp, dewy mornings, thick evenings—
wind, cold; air, heavy. Every breath, tentative,
calculated. Measured movements. Weary
words, fragments. Lost wedding rings, flung
across rooms, bodies that have been treated
unkindly. Breath wracking chests. Too soft,
too loud, can’t feel, hurts much too much.
Wrists ache, ankles crack, bones, bones.
A soul of bones.
What she says:
Love incessantly,
originally, rambunctiously. Feel the gravity
of someone else’s lips. Choose to belong
to somebody. Choose to wear his heart
next to yours. Trace the way he moves.
Move the way he moves. I am sorry
and I love you are lovelier on the tongue
than I was right. Lend your ears.
You are lucky to have them. Share
your mind, for it is exquisite. Do
not break eye contact. Look, look,
do not fear his eyes, for he will learn
to love yours.
But.
Hush, be silent.
The world is vibrating; can you hear it?
Hush. Hear the world vibrate. Do not cut
into it with your voice. Speak in ellipses,
not in full-stops. Do not breathe loudly—
go quietly the way the wind does. Grieve,
but heal. Live quietly. Live quietly,
or he will go. And loneliness is much too heavy
to bear.
How she goes:
Slowly first,
then, all of a sudden, too fast to hold
with your fingertips. Tentative,
the way a foot falls, heel first, then toes.
She goes like hourglass sand that you’ve left
for a few minutes too long, but sudden enough
so that you look at the hourglass and wonder
where the time has gone with a sinking heart.
She goes the way the world vibrates—unnoticed
until it’s gone and then its implications, dire.
Measured, the way your heart beats
when you’re sitting still, and then faster.
And then faster.
She goes the way she is.
Quietly, swiftly, softly, water spilling
through long fingers.
How you miss her:
Between
every breath. Between heartbeats.
The missing looks something like wind
blowing through blades of grass, ceaseless,
back, forth, one way, the other. Yesterday.
Today. Tomorrow. It looks like the way
you speak, words rising in your chest
until they fall and you cannot utter them
and this is where you miss her, in the sobs,
in the violent trembling of shoulders.
And you lend your ear to the earth
and you plead with it to vibrate.
And when it doesn’t, when it is silent,
this is what you say:
I love you.
And:
I am sorry.
Megana Iyer is a sophomore at USC studying computational neuroscience. Her greatest companions have always been a novel and a pen. Aside from reading and writing, Megana also loves music, the outdoors, photography, and chocolate.